Three Strikes; We're Out

Sue felt well enough to get up and have a bit of breakfast while Ruth and I got ready for the sightseeing bus tour. It’s much colder, maybe 40 degrees and windy. The sky is a milky white with a subtext of blue.

We get off the bus just once - to see San Croce, where Michelangelo, Galileo, Machievelli, and others are buried. The Medici chapel is there as well. The church is in the throes of extensive restoration (been there, done that, got the tee shirt) and it means that some of the gravesites are not visible. Dante is covered in plastic, something I’m sure he’d assign to about the seventh circle of hell, but Michelangelo’s tomb right next door is still visible. No flash permitted, but most of the photos turn out OK. I am especially taken with Galileo's tomb, where the Italian flag colors are displayed prominently.

We have time for lunch. Hindsight being 20/20, it would have been better for us to skip it. We had a pleasant enough meal in a charming little restaurant and resumed our seats on the bus. By the time we’d gotten to the hilltop neither of us felt great. By the time we were back at the villa, both of us felt pretty awful. Sue was resting but said she was a lot better. Good thing. 

I was first to succumb to the food poisoning. Ugh. If you have a delicate stomach - skip a couple of paragraphs. I tried to rest after vomiting, but diarrhea made that impossible. Maybe Ruth has a much stronger, Teutonic, constitution. She held out for a couple more hours, then likewise was sick. Ironically, Sue ended up tending to both of us including sudden onslaught episodes during which neither of us could move from our respective rooms.  FYI, there is one bathroom in the villa.

It’s always good to have a medical professional around, even one who’d just been in bed for nearly two days herself. I guess if she could cope with the lion in Kabul, we may have seemed quite tame.

What are the chances that three ordinarily healthy people would find themselves house-bound in Florence with such a round-robin of maladies? Well…it is the Day of the Woman.

On a more upbeat note: Mary found her passport at the travel agency that booked our train tickets to Florence. Her conference went well and she’s staying in Rome tonight with her friend from the US embassy. One of is having a great time, the heat has stayed on, and tomorrow is another day.

The weather forecast for tomorrow: snow.